Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism

by Alex Sayf Cummings

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge a future built on intellectual labor and the production of intellectual property.In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight into how tech-driven development occurs and the people and places left in its wake.

Genres: Nonfiction

266 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 28, 2020

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Brain Magnet for my Globalizing NC Honors Seminar, with the conversation of the course centered largely on this text among other excerpts from various papers and research.

This book covered so much of North Carolina’s history and its shift from industrial to post-industrial to a knowledge economy. The commentary and arguments made about RTP’s creation were eye opening all in their own way. Cummings did an amazing job at explaining and expanding on key concepts - like knowledge economy, creative class, smokestack chasing, cognitive capitalism, and more - throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed their stress on the paradoxes throughout North Carolina, whether that’s the development of RTP and the planning/zoning conflicts that arose compare to what is needed for the park to succeed. Or the inequality that’s synonymous with the knowledge economy, specifically when dealing with the lower, working class, marginalized groups, or even the urban vs. rural comparisons made throughout North Carolina. This book will leave you through about not only NC’s history and the story of RTP, but also make you question your position your own city is in as every region struggles to find its place in the next emerging economy.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

In telling RTP's history, the author does a fantastic job displaying the realities of the postindustrial economy in the U.S.

The story presented here of the Triangle shows just how important a metro's development is to the people who live there & every aspect of their lives, and how none of it is by accident. Generations of planners and public officials have been involved in shaping the spaces around us and circumstances we find ourselves in, and behind every decision is a calculation of who we want to be and what 'the good life' that we are pursuing looks like (though her argument is more eloquent than I'm summarizing it here).

The urban sprawl, gross inequality, and prioritization of the educated & affluent was literally built into the idea that our current reality was born from.

[LaanSiBB]

Fascinating lens to discuss developments of suburban space, technology, labour history and political economy. In comparision to today's silicon valley, the research is an interesting contrast in terms of regional pull-push factors. It would be interesting to have a book comparing different gentrification in the name of progressive change.